As the print industry whithers and dies, many gaming publications are folding – as EGM recently did – but GamePro is trying a unique approach by getting into publishing independent games on downloadable platforms.{ad}

“By letting us handle all of the sales and marketing for your products, you get more time to code,” reads the GamePro Labs sales pitch. The partnership offers developers “regular promotion in GamePro Magazine,” “association with the GamePro brand,” and “management of all distribution relationships” with app store managers like Apple and Microsoft.

GamePro offers support for Microsoft’s XNA platforms (Xbox 360, Zune, and PC) as well as Apple’s App Store and the PlayStation Network. The Labs are accepting applications from interested developers who submit descriptions and screenshots of their games.

Blake’s Take
GamePro’s business approach is obviously that of a middleman – which is not uncommon in the games industry – but its plan strikes me kind of like print journalism itself in the Internet age: too little, too late. Making games easy to self-publish is a major selling point of Apple’s App Store, and virtually every other digital distribution outlet is following in Apple’s footsteps. Microsoft, for example, has made its XNA Community Games feature succeed with indie darling The Maw up for several awards and a full-blown Xbox Live Arcade release.

So if programmers can already submit their own work to Apple by filling out a form, attaching some screenshots and clicking a button, what do they need to entrust to GamePro? “Regular promotion in GamePro magazine” is a nice perk, but it’s only one media outlet out of the zillions of news sources hardcore gamers read every month or even every day. If GamePro offered to promote its label’s games among all gaming publications – like a modern games industry PR firm does – its service might be of significantly more value.

What’s more, what “distribution relationships” are there to manage? These days a distribution relationship isn’t a network of warehouse owners that deliver to electronics stores, it’s a single login for a developers-only website. Unless GamePro is able to work some sort of magic that eases the submission process with the App Store (perhaps by ensuring that games won’t be rejected), I find it difficult to find any benefit to entrusting an outside party with handling one’s own work.

In short, middleman businesses commonly struggle to make their value known in the production and sale of a product, but GamePro has failed to make it clear how it truly adds value to the sale of indie games. App stores supporting self-publishing game creators have taken things a step forward, and GamePro appears to think it can sustain itself by dragging things backwards.